The American Ballet Theatre whips up a four-year partnership with the Auditorium

Marty Sohl photo

Christine Shevchenko and Calvin Royal III in "Songs of Bukovina" from American Ballet Theatre

Christine Shevchenko and Calvin Royal III in "Songs of Bukovina" from American Ballet Theatre (Marty Sohl photo)

KT HawbakerChicago Tribune

On Thursday, the Auditorium Theatre and American Ballet Theatre unveiled a four-year partnership, beginning with the previously announced “Whipped Cream” performance to be staged in April 2019.

The institutions’ collaborative engagements will be staged each spring through 2022. ABT first appeared at the Auditorium in 1969 and has made a lasting impact on Chicago’s dance community.

“While growing up in the northwest suburbs,” wrote freelance critic Lauren Warnecke in a February feature on the ballet company. “I have vivid memories of my parents bringing me downtown to the Auditorium Theatre to watch American Ballet Theatre. For a young student of ballet, it doesn’t really get any better than that — I was fortunate to watch Julie Kent perform Odette/Odile in ‘Swan Lake,’ and Paloma Herrera, who was a teenager at the time, dance Juliet in Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s dreamy version of Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet.’”

The ABT partnership follows the Joffrey Ballet’s announced move from the Auditorium to the Lyric, a shift slated for 2020.

“The Auditorium has an international dance series, a speaker series, a rental business for corporate meetings, and other private and public events, and, for example, it now bills itself as the Chicago home of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater,” Tribune critic Chris Jones wrote of the Joffrey’s intended move in 2017. “But Alvin Ailey has five nights scheduled for 2018. That is a mere fraction of the Joffrey business. The Auditorium will have a big hole from 2020 onward.”